Neighbors in Worth complained about the sprawling Italian villa Robert Stewart created at the corner of 110th Street and Oketo Avenue.
But it was a testament to his personality that during his quixotic 10-year effort to build the house, strangers brought him food and contractors lent him supplies and assistance on weekends.
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As the 5,700-square-foot, $750,000 house took shape, then faltered and finally was torn down by the village, it became symbolic to others with improbable dreams, a monument to the perseverance of a sunny iconoclast.
Mr. Stewart, 64, a onetime monk who became an electrician, an artist and an endearing eccentric, died Tuesday, April 16, in South Suburban Hospital in Hazel Crest.
He had suffered a massive stroke and heart attack on April 7 in the Oak Forest mobile home where he had been rebuilding his life. He often visited the vacant lot where his house once stood. Friends thought he hoped to rebuild the home.
More than 40 people attended his short funeral in Oak Forest’s St. Damian Catholic Church on Friday, where Mr. Stewart was lauded for–in most cases–triumphing over adversity.
His wife of more than 30 years, Carole, was at the service. Though separated over his obsession with building a sweeping mansion in their quiet neighborhood, she had been at his side during his numerous court appearances, struggles with lung cancer, and frequent bouts with bronchitis and pneumonia.
Rev. Francis Kaucky, assistant pastor at St. Damian, said Mr. Stewart had faced physical challenges and risen above them. “There is a Good Friday in everybody’s life,” Kaucky said in his homily. “Robert Stewart had a lot of Good Fridays.”
Friends recalled a devout and philosophical man who spent a dozen years in a Kentucky Passionist monastery as a young man but who later left religious life to work as an electrician in the Chicago area.
Mr. Stewart and his wife were married in the late 1960s and moved to Worth in 1970, where they bought a three-bedroom ranch house on a corner lot surrounded by bungalows. In 1990, after retiring to a life of oil painting and wood sculpting, Mr. Stewart approached village officials with a plan to convert his garage into a two-story art studio.
In a fateful decision, the village refused the permit.
“If they just would have let me have my art studio,” he later told a reporter, “I never would have started in on the house.”
The house swelled to 3,300 square feet, then 5,700 as plans were drafted to make it still bigger. His wife moved out when only two of the house’s original walls remained.
But Mr. Stewart, convinced he was in the midst of his greatest work of art ever, remained.
“I’m trying to beautify and raise up the village of Worth,” he told a Cook County Circuit Court judge in 1995. “If … an individual can’t do what he wants with his own money, there’s something wrong.”
Friends called him a perfectionist who only needed more time to complete what was already a local legend. Others wondered why the perpetually half-finished building wasn’t condemned and torn down sooner.
“He can get on with his life,” she told a reporter. But his friend Frank Soczek said Mr. Stewart–to his credit–never really did.
“I guess you need to express yourself in a way, and he did, in a grand way,” Soczek said. “Unfortunately, I just feel he was never really adept at working the system.”
Mr. Stewart is also survived by a sister, Nancy Ruzicka.